Quail Island

On the 25th October the Year 8's and Year 7's from Whanau class took a trip to Quail Island, Quail Island is South East of Christchurch. Māori knew Quail Island as Ōtamahua, the ‘place to gather sea-bird eggs’. The first European known to have set foot on Ōtamahua, was Captain William Mein Smith of the schooner Deborah in 1842. Mein Smith named the island after the now extinct native quail which were present in large numbers. Ōtamahua was acquired by the Crown from the Ngai Tahu in 1850. It was originally bought from the Crown by the three Ward brothers in 1850. It was farmed for a brief period before the tragic death of the two elder brothers, by drowning, in the following year. Over much of this time the island also functioned as a human and animal quarantine station from 1875 to 1931. In 1987, the management of the island was transferred to the Department of Ōtamahua / Quail Island has two sheltered beaches and it is used frequently during the spring and summer months as a popular site for picnics, swimming and boating. It has good visitor facilities, with water supplied from Lyttelton and a system of tracks that traverse the island. Although Ōtamahua / Quail Island lacked wooded cover at the time of the European arrival, it would have supported forest a few centuries earlier. Remnants of such forest occur today on nearby Manson's Point Peninsula. It is likely that the island's original woodlands were cleared by early Polynesian settlers for agriculture and strategic purposes. The vegetation is assumed to have been a dry, coastal broadleaf-podocarp forest that is now rare. A small fragment of this forest type is found at North West Bay in Okains Bay. Other small areas of similar forest occur between Waipara and Conway Rivers and north of the Clarence River mouth, in North Canterbury and Southern Marlborough. A few kanuka (Kunzea ericoides) plants near the west end of Ōtamahua / Quail Island hint at a former much more extensive cover of this species.

Prior to the start of the ecological restoration project in 1998, the southern and eastern sides of the island were largely dominated by plantations of introduced shelter and amenity trees such as pines, cypresses, oaks and sycamores and some weedy introduced shrubs. The plateau was formerly divided into fields that grew crops such as wheat and potatoes, and was dominated by exotic grasses. On the drier, northern aspects native grasses were more common and some native shrubby patches occurred in gullies. On the southern aspects were several large areas where native bracken fern and small-leaved native shrubs and flax were recolonising the grassland but only a few individual native tree species of natural origin, other than kanuka, were present on the island (cabbage tree, Cordyline australis; ngaio, Myoporum laetum; broadleaf, Griselinia littoralis) and rare mahoe (Melicytus ramiflorus). However, there was good growth and some regeneration of areas of native trees and shrubs planted in 1982 by the Department of Lands and Survey. The evident vegetation patterns strongly suggested that Ōtamahua / Quail Island retained an environment suitable for growth of indigenous woodland. 

Before Europeans arrived at Quail Island Maori would use the island as a source of food as the island was unsuited to live on. Mainly to gather seabirds eggs, giving it the name Ōtamahua meaning 'the place to gather seabirds eggs'.